PARIS (Reuters) – France has denied citizenship to a veiled Moroccan woman on the grounds that her “radical” practice of Islam is incompatible with basic French values such as equality of the sexes, a legal ruling showed on Friday. The case will reignite debate about how to reconcile freedom of religion, which is guaranteed by the French constitution, and other fundamental rights, which many in France feel are being challenged by the way of life of some Muslims.

Le Monde newspaper said it was the first time a Muslim applicant had been rejected for reasons to do with personal religious practice. “She has adopted a radical practice of her religion, incompatible with essential values of the French community, particularly the principle of equality of the sexes,” said a ruling by the Council of State handed down last month and sent to Reuters on Friday to confirm a report in Le Monde. The Council of State is a judicial body which has final say on disputes between individuals and the public administration. Married to a French national, the woman arrived in France in 2000, speaks good French and has three children born in France.

She wears a black burqa that covers all her body except her eyes, which are visible through a narrow slit, and lives in “total submission” to her husband and male relatives, according to reports by social services. Le Monde said the woman is 32. The woman’s application for French nationality was rejected in 2005 on grounds of “insufficient assimilation”. She appealed to the Council of State, which last month approved the rejection. In the past, nationality was denied to Muslims who were known to have links with extremist circles or who had publicly advocated radicalism, which is not the case here.

The ruling comes weeks after a heated debate over whether traditional Muslim views were creeping into French law, prompted by a court annulment of the marriage of two Muslims because the husband said the wife was not a virgin as she had claimed to be. In the case of the Moroccan woman, Le Monde suggested the Council of State had gone to the opposite extreme by rejecting the woman’s beliefs and way of life rather than accommodating them.

“Is a burqa incompatible with French nationality?” the newspaper asked. The legal expert who provided a formal report on the case to the Council of State wrote that the woman’s interviews with social services revealed that “she lives almost as a recluse, isolated from French society,” Le Monde reported. “She has no idea about the secular state or the right to vote. She lives in total submission to her male relatives. She seems to find this normal and the idea of challenging it has never crossed her mind,” Emmanuelle Prada-Bordenave wrote.

Roselyne Bachelot, the French Minister of Health, would like to ban outright the “anti-youth” device known in France as Beethoven, and in England as The Mosquito. The device, a CD that emits ultrasounds at 17,000 hertz over an area of 20 yards, is designed to disturb the hearing of the young, which is much keener than that of adults. Businesses and apartment buildings where gangs congregate and commit mayhem use the device to repel the youth, and it seems to work! At least in England where it has been in use since 2006, in front of certain stores, in buildings and parking lots.

But according to Bachelot, as quoted in Le Figaro:

I hope it will be totally forbidden whatever legal form that may take. […] This ban requires an inter-ministerial effort: we have been working together with other government officials ever since the issue became a public controversy. […] We have no study on what its effects are: the question of its harmlessness is therefore raised both for young people and pregnant women. Since this is a question of health, precaution must be exercised.

It is hard not to be amused by this. Nobody is allowed to speak negatively of the “youth”, arrests are infrequent and short, cops are restricted in what they can do to stop criminals, the media use doublespeak when describing criminals, and yet it is clear that the citizens are at their wits end and resorting to a type of “insect repellent” to get rid of the troublemakers. Life is unlivable in many neighborhoods, but no one is willing to stop the root causes of violent behavior.

French readers will enjoy Le Conservateur and his readers’ comments. He feels the device has no future in France since it is bound to be regarded as discriminatory against a particular group (i.e. criminals). He and his readers also suggest that just playing classical music loudly might do the trick, and speculate on how undesirables could be dispersed by the sounds of the great composers of Western civilization.